James Sullivan

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | James Sullivan

Amanda Palmer played several anguished new songs and conducted a question-and-answer session for an audience of about 300 at the Armory in Somerville on Saturday. It was a return to the stage for her after a woman filed a civil lawsuit against her estranged husband, the writer Neil Gaiman, earlier this year accusing him of sexual assault and Palmer of trafficking and negligence.

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | James Sullivan

Travel back in time, if you will, to Ohio’s Kent State University in the early 1970s, when a small group of like-minded students were formulating a high-concept art project. While studying visual art and performance, these students came to believe that human beings were regressing into vapidity and chaos. Their ideas about the “de-evolution” of modern society proved to have staying power.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | James Sullivan

When Zach Bryan introduced “Burn, Burn, Burn” on social media in 2022, he shared a tribute to the late writer Jack Kerouac, whose classic Beat novel “On the Road” had inspired the song. The record-setting songwriter is more than just a Kerouac fan: He’s now the owner of the Lowell church that is slated to become the home of the Jack Kerouac Center, a multi-purpose enterprise in honor of the city’s favorite son.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | James Sullivan

The best comment Jackie Skinner ever got after a performance sounded like an insult. “There’s something wrong with you,” a woman told her, “but I like that.”For Skinner, it was a complete validation. “The world is so big, and you’re so small,” she says. “Every performance you do is a gift.”Skinner is one-half of Jackie and Allison, a sketch comedy team that specializes in “clowning” — not the Ringling Bros.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | James Sullivan

In 1977, NASA stowed a pair of gold-plated phonograph records on the two Voyager spacecraft missions to the outer reaches of our solar system. Organized by a committee led by the astronomer Carl Sagan, the records were a “message in a bottle” created to contact intelligent life on other planets, featuring greetings in dozens of languages, natural field recordings from Earth, and music by Bach, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry.